If fireplaces are so inefficient, how did people manage when they were the only heat source in the home?

Question

I understand that with a traditional fireplace, most of the heat is lost through the chimney and you have to be very close to it to feel much heat. A wood stove or insert performs much better. However, I’m curious how people stayed warm enough in a house. It would seem that everywhere besides being near the fireplace would be freezing. I guess fireplaces were mostly meant to locally heat people near the fireplace, and not so much that the fireplace is a central heat source. That would explain why people often had a fireplace in every room. Just light the fireplace that you will be near for most of the time, etc. rather than heat the whole house. Just curious since you often hear “warm by the fireplace”.

In: Technology

Answer 1

Some places (I’ve seem this in Mongolia, Ireland, and Canada), build the house around the chimney to make the system more efficient. As in, they do this to utilize heat transfer from the brick to the air, and instead of having the brick chimney of the fireplace be on an outer wall of the house, it is in the middle. The brick (which looks thinner than modern brick I see in ornamental fireplaces) then heats the air inside the house more (low and slow, but in Mongolia in winter it still kept the house warm) on the first and second story (if there is one). It was great actually, I got to lay my wet clothes on the brick and they dried! In Mongolia there was a metal sheet with air entry vents they kinda leaned on the open face of the fireplace at night to slow the burning and yet keep the heat in the brick. Maybe not directly helpful, but similar concept: I manage my house (I live in rural Alaska) with a wood stove which is in the middle of my home- and while my first story stays very warm, my second story stays only decently warm with this system. However, the second story room with the wood stove chimney in it stays almost as warm as the first floor because of the heat the chimney provides. If the chimney were close to an external wall/on an external wall, I would loose a lot of this heat to the outside.